Yes, exactly like the man in the article. People are trying to make this into some political, partisan fight, which causes people’s trust in experts to be eroded. There’s a whole story about this called the boy who cried wolf.

The President's whole brand is that he knows more than the experts. I'm listening to him right now, live, saying 'the doctors re telling us we have to shut down the whole world, they want to shut it down for years, but you can't let the cure be worse than the problem.'

He's talking complete nonsense about quarantine and how bad it is to close the stock exchange while saying the quarantine is a bigger problem than the virus because he's created so many jobs and that it'll cause 'tremendous death.'

¯\(°_o)/¯

I’m a died-in-the-wool liberal, and I think he’s right about that.

We aren’t rationally weighing costs and benefits right now. We really should be talking more about what we’re doing to the economy, and if there are better ways to move forward.

Hard to understand your point. It seems quite obvious to me that you can't shut down the world economy for any length of time without introducing enormous amounts of collateral damage (i.e. deaths).

What is nonsense about that?

The experts in China, South Korea and Taiwan have proven that you can get the disease under control with testing, contract tracing and serious quarantine methods. The alternative is collapsing the healthcare system because available hospital beds are full of coronavirus patients - coronavirus isn't the flu, 20 % of patients are hospitalized for three weeks. We are observing that in Italy and New York State.

The President needs to stop talking generalities.

They also haven't shut down their economies, which was the point I was making. The actions you describe are not mutually exclusive to a more nuanced approach to reduced economic activity. That is, something other than economic suicide.

They were able to take a more nuanced and targeted approach because they got their testing infrastructure in place very quickly and made tests widely available. That way, they were able to quickly figure out who had the virus and needed to be quarantined.

The USA, in stark contrast, had a gutted CDC (thanks to the hard work of the GOP to shrink the government), an abolished White House Pandemic Response office (used to be part of the national security group), and a President who first ignored and then downplayed repeated warnings from his own country's Intelligence Community because he thought it was a "hoax".

That is why the time for "nuanced" approaches is past, and drastic actions are needed. You can check this website for some sobering charts: https://covidactnow.org/

Regarding the economy, tell me this: do you seriously think our economy can handle millions of deaths within the span of several months?

> The USA, in stark contrast, had a gutted CDC (thanks to the hard work of the GOP to shrink the government), an abolished White House Pandemic Response office (used to be part of the national security group), and a President who first ignored and then downplayed repeated warnings from his own country's Intelligence Community because he thought it was a "hoax".

The CDC budget has not been gutted (https://mises.org/wire/cdcs-budget-larger-now-under-obama). Perhaps you meant that he proposed reductions. Sure, but that didn't happen so you can't use a reduced budget as the cause for anything.

The Pandemic Response Office was consolidated as part of the restructuring of the NSC. The office might have been eliminated but the function was not. (https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/465320-reducin...)

And as for your "hoax" comment. You are just parroting false accounts of what the President said. His reference to a "hoax" was to the particular types of criticisms being made by the Democrats not to the virus. It is obvious on its face that he hasn't thought it was a hoax since he has continued to make executive decisions that would make no sense if he thought it was a hoax (e.g. banning travel from China in mid January)

Unfortunately, you have been suckered into believing lots of things that just aren't true. The press continues to embarrass itself during this crisis.

> Regarding the economy, tell me this: do you seriously think our economy can handle millions of deaths within the span of several months?

Well it is a bit of a false choice you are forcing on me, but it is quite possible that a destroyed world economy could lead to more deaths than could be caused by the virus alone. As bad as things are, they could get a whole lot worse.

I think you understand my point just fine.

President talks about the preliminary reports that HCQ is working for treating COVID-19 around the world. It might be a good treatment here.

People freak out. "Preliminary doesn't mean proven!"

Man self-medicates with HCQ and dies.

President's fault??

Yes, I think so. People grew up to trust institutions, and for decades they had good reason to (at least in the subjects of public health and safety). Who's to blame when after decades -- no, centuries -- we elect a leader who makes false claims that are counter to medical science -- and potentially hazardous, if followed, to the public health? The victim, or the authority?

I know which party I blame.

The man who died drank aquarium cleaner. It is a huge stretch to blame that on Trump.

He didn’t. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22670152

Actually, he did: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/man-dies-wife-in-critical-...

He drank aquarium cleaner because the President of the United States told him it would cure the virus. Not a stretch at all.

Trump told people to take it without a prescription?

President shouldn't talk about things he clearly doesn't understand. Compare this to how Obama used to measure every single word he said.

All presidents talk about stuff they don't understand.

Like this?

“I like this stuff. I really get it. [...] People are really surprised I understand this stuff. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

“Anybody who wants a test will get a test, that’s the bottom line. [...] The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.”

Perhaps so, but some things are more important to delegate to experts than others. There's little harm in misstating the speed of light; another to suggest that a potentially hazardous drug that can be found OTC can be used to cure a virus when it cannot - and especially without dosage information.